each of these people have an exalted view of themselves and it makes it hard to have relations with other people. dictatorship by nature seems to be a suspicious system. >> learn more about world war ii leadership tonight here on american history tv. >> if you like american history tv, keep up with us during the week on facebook, twitter, and youtube. learn what happened on this day in history. follow us at c-span history. >> the first nuclear bomb test exploded in the desert of new mexico in 1945. the lead project scientist later observed we knew the world would not be the same. a few people laughed, a few

people cried, most people were silent. next on american history tv, to commemorate the anniversary of the trinity test, a historian tells the story behind creating the bomb and describes the trepidation leading up to the historic test. los alamos national laboratory provided the video for this program. >> thank you for tuning in. it is the 75th anniversary. i want you to be thinking about this question. is trinity the greatest single scientific experiment? think about that as we go through the slides this morning and hopefully that question will inspire a lot of people. let's go ahead and begin the show.

of course, to understand the trinity test, we have to explore the historical context of the test. that means looking at world war ii. we will do that quickly this morning. a lot of these topics deserve talks in and of themselves. the manhattan project did not come into the effect until the summer of 1942. the reason it took so long for the manhattan project to come into existence was because we recognized nuclear weapons were transformative technology that changed the world. we lagged behind other countries such as britain. the brits helped us recognize how far behind we were.

the mission of the manhattan project was to beat the nazis and work on atomic weapons. [indiscernible] we didn't know that at the time. remember germany was the first to produce efficient in 1948. a lot of people thought it might be a short time. that was why we started to build the atomic bomb. the manhattan project was an enormous international project.

the manhattan project employed over 100,000 people simultaneously. it has been estimated that over half a million people worked on it at one point or another. here at los alamos, our mission was to design, build, test, and help deliver atomic weapons and combat. we had a very broad mission. relative to the rest of the manhattan project, we had about 1700 technical staff members. los alamos in terms of personnel was relatively small. our first director was

considered to be america's leading theoretical physicist. he had no management experience. the laboratory grew and oppenheimer grew with it. under the tutelage of his boss. we have a picture in the presentation today. the general was in charge of the entire manhattan project. you look at weapons design during the manhattan project. originally, we were focused on two different types of gun type weapons. everyone knows the uranium weapon. the plutonium weapon in the spring of 1944, just down the

road from where we are, the plutonium would not work because of the pre-initiation problem. this was a significant setback for los alamos and the manhattan project. we were forced to look at it in a different way. up until that point, there were few people looking at implosion. instead of shooting things at each other, we're going to take a sphere of tony him surrounded with high explosives -- a sphere of plutonium surrounded with high explosives. that is more -- it is highly

reliant on high explosives. there's no such thing as precision high explosives. complicated we don't know where it is in his quest to build the atomic bomb. oppenheimer organizes the laboratory in august of 1944. trinity is conducted less than a year later. it was tested july 16, 1945. these weapons were delivered to combat and august of 1945 -- in august of 1945, a pretty remarkable achievement. so the implosion research that

had been going on up to that time really was a sideshow that oppenheimer tolerated. i characterize it that way because, during world war ii, we had been getting things done as quickly as possible. not only were the germans, we thought, pursuing a nuclear weapon, and the japanese, but hundreds of americans were dying in combat every day of the war on average, so getting the job done, producing a reliable weapon as quickly as possible, was job one. so to spare a few people to look at this far out idea was why it was a sideshow. two divisions were created to create an imploding weapon, x division and g division. the g stood for gadget.

also known more formally as the weapons physics division. let's go on to another slide. with that as a backdrop, why would you conduct a test? little boy, as we mentioned before, pretty straightforward. they will take some uranium, shoot it into some more uranium, and it will go off. that is not exactly true. there were no full-scale tests of little boy to be sure, but there were many smaller scale tests conducted here at los alamo's. lots of testing. it was not simply that, as i have in my slides, that they were confident or that they knew little boy would work -- were confident that little boy would work. they knew that little boy would

work because of the small-scale testing at the laboratory. the plutonium bomb they were not confident about, especially early. they do not know if this will work or not. you see the photograph of trinity's test director. he worked on trinity. he has this quote. presented with a large amount of active material, so, again, if we are going to put this into combat, we have to know that it works. they were not certain that it would work, especially early on, so their confidence grew in late 1944, 1945 because they did lots of testing at the laboratory. they did lots of small-scale testing in this case, lots of high explosive testing.

a lot of these off-the-shelf high explosive compounds, they have to figure out if they can make them work, so they start loading stuff up, here at the laboratory. with every experiment they do, they create a more complete understanding of how fat man would work. we get to spring of 1940 four, and most of the scientists are good and confident with this new working compound -- are getting confident with this new working compound. they are not sure it will work. now, general groves, oppenheimer's boz, did not want to do a test. why would he care? first, do nuclear tests is very expensive. we will see some of the expense that went into this. perhaps even more crucially, it is time consuming. it will take time to get the test ready.

we do not have time to burn. another issue involved is that doing a test would have consumed a huge percentage of the world's supply plutonium, so for these reasons, general groves just wanted to be told it would work so it could be put into combat. let's do it quickly, cheaply and end this war as fast as we can, but oppenheimer intervened and told his boss, basically, we cannot tell you this will go off if we drop it. with that in mind, general groves approved the test. before we get to the test, we will spend quite a get -- quite a bit of time looking at several aspects of the trinity test, including its name. where did the name come from? on this slide, you can see several i vad is -- several of the ideas associated with the trinity test. there used to be a lot more

conjecture, especially in the early days. we will talk about what jumbo is . oppenheimer's -- oppenheimer was familiar with text such as the by god to kita -- the bhagavad ghita, the hindu scripture. my favorite story, trinity was called that name because it represented the culmination of the work of the manhattan project's three main sites, and that is a lovely story, but it is fabricated. they are pretty upfront. that is just an invented story.

we do not know -- we do know where the name came from. it came from oppenheimer himself. many years after the war was over, general groves decided to write a memoir. it is a pretty interesting and good read. and as general groves is writing this memoir, he wanted to know where the name trinity came from, so he wrote a letter to oppenheimer and oppenheimer wrote back. he said i came up with the name trinity. i am not sure where the name came from, but at the time, i was reading the poetry of john donne. i just a clear member that. if you remember -- i distinctly or member that. so he thinks that that poem likely inspired oppenheimer to make trinity trinity. let's go through the slides. we have our name now.

let's see what we have next. requirements for the test site. now this is a significant question, because one thing i want you to think about as we go through all of these questions, how do we find the site, how do we keep it secure, how do we keep things safe, is put yourself in their position and think about all of the challenges associated with doing these things. let's say that the laboratory was ordered to do a nuclear test today for some reason, just politics and everything else beside. -- aside. the united states has conducted over 1000 nuclear tests. ok. let's go back to 1945. they were asked to do a test in 1945. how many tests had been done? none. so every aspect of this test is unprecedented. where are we going to set off a nuclear blast?

this is a pretty tough question when you start to think about it. there are not many great places to do it. what would make the ideal place? you see some of the requirements. you will also note that they recognize the test will probably be necessary early on, so they prepared the test months before trinity happened. first of all, the test site has to be flat. we do not want to have nearby things that may affect such and such. we need a clear view of it. we will be doing a lot of experiments and we do not want the topography to interfere. next, the weather has to be favorable. obviously, when we are trying to get rid of a test -- trying to get ready for a test, we do not want rain or snow or other potentially distracting weather

conditions. there's another reason why we need favorable weather, and that is fallout. they knew at the time that fallout could be a problem. we are talking about early on, back in late 1944, early 1945. follow could be an issue. what made fallout a whole lot worse is that if we set off a nuclear bomb, it injects irradiated particles into the atmosphere. what if those are brought right back down in concentrated form by precipitation? we don't want precipitation. we want to be somewhere where it is dry. we want those particles to go up into the atmosphere and readily disperse over the globe over a long period of time. even with that said, they did not think fall i would be a big problem in the early days of preparing for this test.

they just knew it could be a problem. so the main safety precaution, if you will, is let's make sure the weather is favorable for this test so we are where it never rains, ok? we will come back to reign in a little while. -- rain in a little while. next, obviously, it has to be isolated. we do not want to set off a nuclear bomb anywhere near a major city. we want to find a place that is far away. as you will see on the slide, for security and safety. safety obviously. we do not want to set off a bomb near people. but for security purposes, remember the manhattan project is arguably history's most secret project ever. how do you conceal an atomic bomb going off? it is not easy. preferably, loss alamo -- lowe's

alamo -- los alamos is not going to be far away. the bombs were not sent fully assembled to the test site. they were sent in pieces. most of the a simile happened here at los alamos, and the final assembly at the test site, but think about it. how far do you want to truck atomic bomb parts around the country? not far. so we wanted to be close to los alamos. finally, by order of the secretary of the interior, native americans could not be displaced in order to make a test site. so start thinking about places that meet those requirements as we go through the next slide. on this slide, you will see several places that were proposed as the test area, including a few areas in new

mexico. also, a couple places in california. there is a training area near rice, california. the lava region south of grants, new mexico. islands in texas. places considered. an island in southern california, the place to the left there. then the valley in new mexico. that roughly translates to the journey of death, the journey of the dead man. that sounds pretty promising. ultimately, that is what will be selected. we will talk more about that later. the final place they consider was the great sand dunes

national monument in colorado. that is not far from here. many of you have probably driven there. it meets a lot of these requirements. there is a lot of flat area near the great sand dunes national park, but ultimately, they decided on another location, the on the gordo bombing -- the alma gordo bombing range. it is not that far from los alamos. if we decided to drive there today, it would take about 3.5 hours. it would have taken longer during world war ii. they probably would have been using big military trucks, going maybe 40 miles per hour. the roads were not as good, but it is drivable over time. so that helps. it is flat.

some of the area on the bombing range had cattle, things like that, but the army already controls the area, so that helps from a security perspective. it is certainly isolated. there are some nearby very small towns. we will talk more about security. anyway, they thought that would make the best site to do this test. next slide. we have to get ready for this test. we're not going to just take a bomb out to the desert and set it off. so preparation started in october of 1944. it was completed just a couple months later in december. here is the issue. we see this a lot in history. they underplay it. we see that over and over again. here, for instance, one of the

reasons oppenheimer's lack of management experience was not an issue [indiscernible] as you mentioned earlier, 1700 technical staff. it grew into a very -- oppenheimer quickly. it's -- that was pretty tough being down at the test site.

there were not a lot of breaks either. as you can see, that spring, spring of 1945, 200 laborers were hired to prepare the test site. they were not sent. they worked all month long trying to get the site ready. at the end of the month, after essentially 30 days in arroyo, they were given a break -- 30 days in a row, they were given a break and then they came back and did it all over again. looking back at the history of the manhattan project, who were they half-million people that worked for the project at various points? most of them were construction workers. you talk about the success of the manhattan project. it would not have been

successful without the people who built. they strung hundreds of holes for wires. if you go to the trinity site today, they will start -- you will start seeing something. they are 3, 5 feet tall poles and wires for diagnostics from the trinity test. they put up hundreds of poles. they built bunkers. the bunkers, two bunkers, is where the trinity test was controlled from. we will talk about the towers they constructed as well. they actually build three towers. we talked about those dozens of

miles of roads a couple of those . security is a very, very important part of the test. we have to keep this secret. do you remember when our test director was talking about where the supplies factor would be lost -- remember, nuclear weapons, they cause a lot of death and widespread destruction , but the united states canal already do that with conventional means -- can already do that with conventional means. first of all, if we sent 1000 planes to tokyo, the japanese

have means of fighting back. they could resist. they would not mind fighting back, even if it was futile. there is no fighting back against an atomic bomb. that is one aspect of this. you cannot fight back. that is the psychological aspect. another is the complete shock of seeing this new, your resistible weapon in combat for the first time. that is one of many reasons we did not do -- you know, a demonstration test. why did we set one off? we wanted to preserve the absolute shock. so we have to keep it secret. we do not want a lot of people here in new mexico seeing this enormous, unprecedented blast going off.

that could impact our ability -- so there were lots of aspects of trinity. the connection between los alamos and trinity -- you cannot use the term los alamos anyway. we were known as project y or site y or things like that. there were very few people involved in the trinity test that new about the connection. laborers did not know about los alamo's at trinity -- los alamos at trinity did not know what they were working on. that connection is a carefully guarded secret.

in terms of physical security, they have chosen to do this test on a military base. there were patrols, people on horseback. base camp, all these other things that were being worked on at the time. the final thing you want to consider in terms of security is when the bomb goes off, how do we make sure that nobody knows that it is a nuclear bomb? the first thing, and a very simple thing, is set it off at 4:00 in the morning. i mentioned that many of you who are watching this recording were not up at 4:00 this morning. not many people are. it is a pretty quiet time of the day. they thought, maybe a few people milling about see it, who cares?

but when 50 or hundred people see this test -- so let's set it off at 4:00 in the morning. that is an important security precaution. the next thing that is important is let's say enough people see this test that we have to publicly acknowledge that. what will we do? they had two press releases ready. the first press release was, if the bomb goes off, and an evacuation is not necessary. that was used. we will talk about why they had to use press release number one. but this press release basically says there was an ammo dump on the military base, it blew up, nobody was hurt. nothing to see here. go about your business. that's it. that is press release number one.

we do not want to issue a press release at all, but this is the backup plan. another backup plan -- what if fallout turns out to be worse than anticipated? we will talk about their contingency planning for that from a safety perspective. go to the next slide. in terms of security, press release two said an ammo dump lit gas shells that blew up on the bombing range and nobody was hurt. to protect the people of this city, that town, their citizens were evacuated for 48 hours. that is backup plan two. fortunately, we did not need to use that. anyway, let's go to the next slide, talk about safety precautions. this is a pretty important part of the story because how safe trinity was remains in the news. some of you may have seen some

stories recently about our congressional delegation here in new mexico taking pictures in trinity. -- organization interested in that, if you want to look that up. focusing now, again, it remains very much a topic today. early on, they did not think fall i be a big issue. they really did not think fallout would be a big issue. now, that changes after they do the rehearsal test in may of 1945, known as the 100 ton test. you can see a short video of the test in just a moment, but after the rehearsal test, they figured out that fallout would be a much bigger problem than they initially thought. so what are they going to do

about that? they recognized that an evacuation of a nearby town, community, and individual farm might be necessary -- an individual farm might be necessary, so they got together nearly 150 soldiers for the evacuation detachment. there were qualified scientists with geithner -- geiger counters and other detection equipment. what they would do is call the evacuation detachment, evacuate the town, the farm, whatever it may have been for about 48 hours or so. they did not think it would be

necessary, but they were ready, so there was quite a bit of planning. do keep in mind the 100 ton test, we are going to do trinity in july. that is not a lot of time prepare -- to prepare, so this became a priority early on. the other thing is, remember, we are going to test at the alamogordo bombing range in part because it never rains there, and we want to make sure it never rains there, so the most up-to-date forecast data was important as well. here are the clips i wanted to show. these show different perspectives on safety at trinity. the first you see is that we are getting pretty close to the tests at this point. it is june 27, 1945, and oppenheimer tells groves, it is my opinion that no personnel outside of the area controlled by us will be measurably exposed

based on the documentation i have seen in the national security research center. i see no reason to doubt that that was oppenheimer's completely honest opinion. they thought they had a lot of controls in place -- they thought they had the right controls in place and were ready to go. the doctor at los alamos, who knew a lot about radiation health, his name was louis templeman. you can see his photograph. he said all i can think of was, my god. all that radioactivity. that was a statement he made years later reflecting back on trinity, but having witnessed that blast live, i do not know if there's anything that can compare to what they were about

to see. those were two different lines of thought. let's go to the next slide and come back to talking about follow and it happened after we get to the test itself. we mentioned jumbo a few times during the talk. let's go back and see what that was. if we go back in time, when the implosion bomb project was new, remember, they did not know if it was going to work. they were not very confident that this new weapon design would work at all. and what if -- because, remember, you have plutonium with high explosives around it. what if, for some reason, there is not enough strength to perfectly and evenly, quickly, compress the plutonium center and we do not get a reaction? what if we just have the high

explosives explosion? it will scatter the plutonium all over the place. plutonium, uranium, these are some of the rarest, most valuable materials in the world then and today. how do we get the plutonium back so we can recapture it and start over? well, that again shows you how little confidence they had. this is one of several different methods of getting the plutonium back. the most famous is jumbo. you can see on the slide, there is a very large container vessel. i believe it was fabricated by [indiscernible] the idea is we will put the imploding bomb inside this containment vessel. if it produces a full nuclear yield, it will vaporize the containment vessel and all will be well.

we will go on and win the war. what if it does not work? when we set off this bomb inside the containment vessel -- the vessel was designed to contain the blast produced by the high explosives, the conventional high explosives. so if we get a high explosive blast but no nuclear yield, the vessel will hold. all of the plutonium will be splattered on the interior of the containment vessel. we can get somebody to go inside the containment vessel, scrape all the plutonium off, and try again. if you are thinking that doesn't sound like a very good idea, you are right. it is not a great idea. but it was the best of multiple bad ideas because, again, this is something you do not want to have to worry about.

you want a full nuclear yield so you can go about your business trying to bring the war to an abrupt end. it is not a great idea, but it shows the desperation at that point in time. you can see a little bit in the story. at 214 ton containment vessel was difficult to get rid of. -- a 200-1410 containment vessel was difficult to get rid of. the bomb was not set often cited this, so it was hung up on a 75 foot tower near ground zero, a half-mile from the ground. it was buried. there is a story that general groves wanted to get rid of jumbo, so we try to have it destroyed. supposedly, because -- although,

general groves had an unlimited budget, he did pay attention to costs. he was scared of getting audited by congress and having to explain what he had done with taxpayer dollars, so jumbo is not cheap. having a company fabricate it halfway across the u.s., shipping a here -- let's see, how many miles of road it we create just to transport jumbo? 25 miles of road. that's not cheap either. general groves wanted to make -- that is not a story i subscribe to. that was not general groves's way of doing business. for some reason -- and i do not know why -- some of you may know more, but multiple 500 pound bombs were put inside jumbo after the war and detonated.

they blew the caps off. that left a cylinder with jagged edges. the caps are still sitting out. i do not know why that was done, but it was. many years later, i believe someone wanted to create a museum. and what better a relic, if you will, than jumbo? jumbo was one of the few surviving actual objects used in the trinity tests, so they had hoped to bring the remnants of jumbo to put on display in this easy him. -- in this museum. the problem they encountered was -- in order to bring jumbo and put it on display, you have to get it over the river, and there is nothing strong enough to bring something of this weight

there. ultimately, it was dug up and brought back to ground zero. some of you who have been to the trinity site probably have taken pictures of jumbo, and it is an interesting surviving piece of the trinity test. that is the story of jumbo. if you look at the bottom photograph there, jumbo standing on the left -- they are, the gentleman standing on the left is the famous mathematician, von neumann. he was one of the many people involved in trying to figure out the hydrodynamics of the explosion, which made this possible. next slide. as you can imagine, trinity was a very highly instrumental test. -- experimental test.

there were lots of experiments. you can see some of the things they wanted to try and assess. the efficiency of the implosion, how much -- how well do we do? how much blast did we get? what about the energy release? that is a fun and middle measure, because -- that is a fundamental measure, because, remember, scientists experiments aside, this is a weapon that is supposed to go into combat. we want to know what it is going to do, so there is a lot of work that went into measuring energy release and the blast. [indiscernible]

-- the top left of the slide. one of the reasons we think they recorded shock data was for future lawsuits. general groves was supposedly very concerned that when the bomb went off -- of course, it would be secret for a while -- it would become public. he was scared that everyone in the three or four state area that had a patio that was falling in, a barn falling apart, a cracked window, that they would be blaming it on the trinity test, so he wanted shock data to prove that it was not that project's fault. that is the main reason.

they wanted to observe the behavior of the firebomb. that goes back into energy release. as it turns out, measuring firebomb -- fireballs was a good way of measuring yield. everybody wents to know what it is -- everybody wants to know what it is going to do. how much yield that we get out? -- did we get out? so we take photographs of the fireball so we can measure. nobody has ever seen anything like this before. we have seen fission on a small scale,, but run away out of control -- but a runaway, out-of-control nuclear chain reaction has never been

observed. from a scientific standpoint, we want to know as much as we can about this phenomenon that will give us insight into how the universe works. some of these experiments -- remember, all of this is unprecedented, but it worked quite well. if you are interested in learning more about the trinity experiment, those results were reported in many reports, the vast majority of them, at this point, are classified. you can find them in the research library today at the national security resource center. let's go on to another slide. you are probably ready to see some explosions. we will get to that point. again, put yourself into their shoes.

bainbridge proposes a practice test. why don't we have herschel? -- we have a rehearsal? the video is not the trinity test. it is a 100 ton test. it is called that because nearly 100 tons of tnt was detonated. you see a couple photos. we already talked about jumbo. as you can see, the scale of the 100 ton test tower. nearly 101 -- nearly 100 tons was set off. lots of diagnostics with trinity. let's make sure that everything works.

they do not understand how significant -- so in terms of our calibration, they were a quarter second off in their diagnostics. you might not think that a quarter second is a long time, but when you are looking at recording a nuclear weapon going off, a quarter second is -- that was a major, major problem they were able to fix. the fallout, it turned out, would be a much larger problem than expected. that is when they started planning for evacuations and things of that nature, which we talked about earlier. an important thing on this slide . that is a significant day in the

history of world war ii. on that day, the third reich surrendered. some of you may have seen documentaries about the surviving german senior leaders, senior generals assigning armistice agreements on the seventh. fighting stopped the next day. so today is -- the 10th. a couple days ago was the anniversary of the end of world war ii. you are probably watching this in july, but world war ii in europe had ended using conventional means. now, using conventional means to end a world war, to end the war in europe, was no trivial matter. as i mentioned earlier, hundreds of americans were killed in combat every day. a little over 300. the soviet union -- peddler

ultimately invaded the soviet union. they lost between somewhere between 20000 and 50,000 every day. -- 15000 and 20,000 every day over were to. this went on for years. the soviet union may have lost as many as 27 million people during world war ii, so the germans are knocked out of the war. the germans are why we started to build nuclear weapons in the first place. they are knocked out of the war. why did world war ii come to an end? japan chose to keep fighting. they are not ready to quit. they are not ready to surrender yet. so planning for the trinity test continues at this point.

let's take a look at another slide. they gained important experience during the 100 ton test. we are going to do another significant test right before the full-scale test. july 14, 1945, two days before trinity is scheduled, we set off a trinity type gadget here at the laboratory. the only difference is there is no plutonium. we wanted to assess the speed of the implosion, among other things. if you look at the photographs we have, this is known as the creutz test or the pajarito test. you can see the apparatus there on the left. in the middle picture, you can

see it being prepared for the practice, plutoniumless gadget. in the background supervising is the division leader of the explosions -- explosives division. his name will come up. a very interesting personality. you can find more information about him on the internet. he was ukrainian, on the side of the monarchy during the russian civil war, and was able to escape here. now, when the bomb was set off at ta18, the initial results as they were determined indicated that the implosion was not going to be enough to make the bomb go supercritical. this was two days before trinity. everybody is already on edge and

now they are finding it is not going to work. this appeared to be a disaster. you can see it did leave a hole in the ground, which is no longer there. if you go down there looking for that -- but anyway, hans baader, who would eventually win the nobel prize, looked at the data again and concluded there were some variables we did not take into consideration and he thought the test would work as advertised. he thought they would be fine. remember, everybody is already on edge. nobody is getting sleep. who is the guy on the hot seat at this point? it is george.

it is not powerful enough, so here he is. he places a ranger with the director of the laboratory. he offers oppenheimer $10 if trinity will be a success. it is probably not a surprise that he would bet on his product, but i find it interesting that oppenheimer bet against trinity. anyway -- we go back to all of these unprecedented bits. how do i keep the test secret? how do you do the test itself? how do you actually get a bomb and make it go off and get data?

the date was chosen based on two things, primarily on two things -- weather forecasts. the other reason was politics. safety was job one here at los alamos, and when you look at the context, that is understandable. you might be shocked to hear me say that, but remember, if you got 300 plus americans killed every day on average during world war two, we put their safety -- your safety in front of theirs? no. we are all in this together, the whole nation. we were trying to get things done. that is not to say that we did not take safety seriously. we certainly took safety very seriously during world war ii. it was just not the top priority because of everything going on

in the war at that point in time. there were things that were more important than safety. one of them was security at that point in time. i enjoy living in an era where my safety comes first. i bet that you do as well, but another thing that came before even security was politics, and by politics i mean, if you are familiar with world war ii history, there was an important conference held in pot stamp -- potsdam slated to begin on july 17, 1945. the reason this was important is because president truman, churchill, prime minister of u.k., and joseph stalin, premier of the soviet union, would come together at potsdam, and germany, not far from berlin, to

discuss. when you think about joseph stalin, a lot of people have forgotten stalin's strategy. we know eventually he helped hitler's start world war ii. millions of people were killed by him in the soviet union during his reign, using direct or indirect means. not a pleasant place to be. arguably one of history's greatest mass murderers. not many people out murdered hitler, so we do not want the president going into a meeting with that guy unsure if he has an atomic bomb or not. that could alter the negotiations, so we have to look the president no. so the test has to be conducted in advance of the conference.

those of the two things that will drive this. the political consideration and the safety consideration. now, commander noris bradberry -- hopefully that name means something -- bradbury was our second director, for 25 years. he was the director of our museum. during the war, he was a group leader. he was a trained physicist. he was also a navy reserve commander. he was a group leader in the explosives division at that point in time and he was in charge of writing the procedure for doing the test. i want everybody here -- everybody here is probably -- many of you have probably had to write a work procedure. i have.

i have had to write more than one. not the most fun thing to do, but an important thing for us to do. i think it is interesting, because some of the identities i have written in the past are a lot longer than the one written for doing the trinity test. bradbury's procedure, his list of things that had to be done, five pages long. that was it. you know, i have written procedures 2.5 times that long. again, times have changed very much. we go back and see bradbury's procedure there. he covers not necessarily how to do all the things, but when many of them are going to be done. let's look at some of these things that have to be done. now, first of all, how do you photograph an atomic bomb? a couple things here. first of all, the video you saw earlier -- he is one of the lead

animator's on the original disk lead in a meters on the original -- he also won an academy award. he currently has the badge, so he has shown us a lot of footage he worked on at no cost for all of us to enjoy. one of the reasons -- one of the ways we would like to thank pete for his contribution, you can still buy some of his products at amazon. these include movies such as trinity and beyond, which i highly recommend. he also wrote a book called how to photograph an atomic bomb. that is one thing he has helped us out -- that is one way he has helped us out. he wrote a book on the subject.

another thing, why would you care? a war is going on. why do we care about photographing an atomic bomb? we already talked about. it is not for science's sake. it is not for history, for posterity. we took photos and films of the fireball in order to diagnose the yield. we will look at some cameras in a little while produced for trinity. -- while they were used for trinity. they did some cool things to make sure the test was recorded successfully, and it was. that level of -- that quickly and successfully. next, transporting the gadget. we talk about this earlier, but if you think about that, it is 1945. how can you take a nuclear weapon from los alamos to the test site?

well, in a couple of pieces. for trinity, the two main pieces were set on a military truck overnight. the plutonium was sent in the back of a sedan, instead of a truck. that is how they transport the gadget. how do you put it back together? it's remember, we are taking this -- remember, we are taking this in parts. how do we put it back together safely once we get down there? that turned out to be more complicated than they originally thought it would be. how do we set it off? are we going to get one of those looney tunes plungers? if you think that is not -- if you think that has not happened in the history of testing before, you are wrong, because it has. how do we actually set it off?

another thing we talk about in the history of testing, there are devices we have tried to set off before that did not go off the way they were supposed to, so, again, the history of testing. trinity is certainly no exception. finally, what if it does not work? if we set off the plunger, what if there is not a boom? what then? how would you like to be j robert oppenheimer? you get it -- you have to call general groves and tell him it is a failure. some good news -- groves was a good person to give that news. how do you tell the president? that will be a bad day.

how do you make sure the bomb is disarmed correctly? norris bradbury did a good job of helping organize this. he was very calm. he had a good sense of humor. by most accounts, he was a nice guy. he was a nice guy with an edge. you know, you have to be careful -- i have to be careful what i put on the record. but bradbury was a nice guy with a good sense of humor. we will see evidence of that. let's move onto another slide. all right. we talked about cameras already, but there were more than 50

official cameras of different types. you see several of them in the bottom photograph. the top photograph that you see is one of the bunkers. remember, there are three bunkers, the main control bunker and two other bunkers. most of the footage was captured at 2000 yards. the west 10,000 bunker looks exactly like it. the normal bunker is tough to get to. if you visit the trinity site in a small group, they might be willing to take you to the west bunker. it is pretty easy to get to and it has a tremendous view of ground zero. you can still see where the ground is scorched from the test.

but anyway, we are recording these photographs. different cameras so you can collect different types of data to be interpreted by the lab scientists. many of the observers were given handheld cameras to document the test. many were not official, if you will. they were not gathering scientific data, but some of the people on the staff also have cameras and are allowed to take pictures. we talked about how you put a ball together. this was done on july 16.

bradberry was in charge of assembling non-nuclear gadget. if you would like to see that, i can send you photos. there is also classified footage of bradberry putting the components together. you can see that by putting in a request to the national security research center. oppenheimer is overseeing the final assembly. the bottom photo, you can see the 100-foot tower, we will talk about that in a few moments. in the bunker of the tower, they put cloth around the base of the tower.

that photo may mean something to some of you looking into the history of criticality, but that is a discussion for a different day. friday the 13th, i believe it was thought that that day would bring [indiscernible] with the trinity test. one problem we had was that when they tried to put the pin into the high explosives assembly, it didn't fit. i think this caused a momentary, i don't want to use the word crisis, but this was an intense moment as they realized that what happened was heat expansion

that caused the pin to expand ever so slightly so that it did not go into the ball. the solution was simple, let it cool down for a little while and then try again. that is what happened. on the morning of the 14th, at the same time a test is being done, the gadget goes up. [indiscernible] why did they put a bomb on top of the tower? a 100-foot steel tower seems a pretty significant expense. first of all, it is going to produce a lot of dust and you

are not going to get a clear view of the fireball. you're going to get a lot of dirt instead. that is one reason. the other reason is a safety issue. instead of going off on the ground, the fireballs going to come into direct content -- contact with a lot of stuff, a lot of earth, and it is going to irradiate those particles and eject that into the atmosphere. so it is going to produce a tremendous amount of fallout. the other reason the tower is 100 feet high is because of fallout. in later tests, towers would get much taller because of fallout. it was tall enough to get some nice photographs in the early stages of the detonation, which

we will see in a few moments. too bad it wasn't 200 feet. let's go on to another slide. now, we are close to the test itself. it is july 15. [indiscernible] joseph mckibben, to my knowledge is a leader with a history longer than anyone else. he was a group leader, if you know of a group leader longer than that, let me know. he was in charge of a group [indiscernible] it has got a big tower there. that was what vander graft built

. they had the world's largest vertical vander graft there. so we have got the fixed mediation, and joseph mckibben wanted to make sure the device was ready to fire. it would be denton noted -- detonated from the south 1000 -- from the south 10,000 yard station. the test was scheduled for 4:00 a.m.. it was asked, why didn't we send it up a little bit before, why did we send it up later, and what was one of the main reasons we chose this bombing range to do this test. it never rains there. it is the desert.

there is no water or anything and guess what happens early on july 16? a tremendous thunderstorm comes through the area. now, the person in the hot seat is meteorologist? albert. general groves is there and if you know anything about general groves' demeanor, he could be pretty gruff and apparently he was in? albert's face -- in hubbard's and apparently he was in jack hubbard's face. that is what happened. you could postpone the test, let's do it in different day. are they going to do that? no, for two reasons.

we already talked about politics. it is more important than security, safety, because we are talking about joseph stalin in the future. he has this negotiating tool available to him. if you are a scientist involved in the manhattan project, you have been at los alamos, this is your experiment. it could bring the war to an abrupt end. it could be history's greatest scientific achievement. have you slept well lately, how well do you sleep the night before? probably not very well. probably you are very tense, exhausted. so we have got to get this done

now. based on hubbard's input, that the rain will go away with the dawn, the test was postponed until break -- until daybreak, until 5:30. what problems did that introduce? [indiscernible] how do you view the video today? how many of you were up at 5:30? probably quite a few more people are going to see this test now, so we better get at least one member of the press ready to go.

a 20 minute countdown begins at 5:09. an interesting side story is that we see what happens at the bottom of this slide on the left, the end of the countdown procedure. july 16, it would have to be delayed, on july 15, they sent the chaplain down there [indiscernible] bradberry was pretty calm throughout this process. they must have felt like there number was up as it poured down rain. so there is a lot of reasons why to conduct a nuclear test. in the case of trinity, the most

important question is simple, will it work? you all know that it does. the countdown ended with the word now. 3, 2, 1, now and in the nuclear age was born at that moment, 5:29:45 seconds in the morning. the gadget produced a yield equivalent of 20,000 -- 21,000 tons of tnt. it was remarkable from a weapons development standpoint. now, you didn't need 500, 1000 planes, to bring that kind of firepower. you needed one plane and one bomb to take care of an entire city. this is going to immediately change the world.

the fireball immediately reached temperatures of tens of millions of degrees. the mushroom cloud was 1000 meters wide. whenever you watch videos of historical nuclear weapons tests on youtube or tv, you see an explosion and immediately, they completely fake introduced noise of explosion. let's say we are six miles away as the nearest observers were at trinity testing, you will see an incredibly brilliant light, the likes of which you have never seen before and will never see since, for quite a while.

at that distance, it is going to take 30 or 40 seconds for the blast wave to reach you. and what you feel, sound is going to come along with that. so for the first 40 seconds, that must've been a very interesting and unusual and disorienting experience. turning it up high and putting it right in front of you, like shooting a gun off next to your ear because you are going to feel the blast of the bomb, you are going to hear a tremendous sound which is compared to a large artillery piece going off very close. this is what it would have been like to be there. the cloud produced by the

trinity test reach an altitude of over -- reached an altitude of over 40,000 feet before it was dispersed. at 5:30 in the morning, not many people witnessed this test and they were forced to go to press release number one. a press article picked up the press release and said there was this tremendous blast felt, a spray of pyrotechnics at the alamogordo bombing range and nobody hurt, nothing to see here, it is all good. this came and went and there wasn't a lot of fanfare

associated with it. what you see is the only color photograph of trinity, taken by jack abbott, one of the members of the photography and film community who had one of the handheld cameras who captured the image. let's go on to our next slide. here are samples of the different types of photography, photos, videos, that were captured. these fast acts cameras were -- fastax gamblers were really high-speed cameras. these were for taking large films of large areas. now, we have original era films taken then.

these are on nine-inch format films. each frame is about the size of a sheet of paper. our friends have been able to scan some of those. you may think, how on earth you scan a piece of film that big, do you just put it on a machine, and the answer is no. they crank it one frame at a time over a conventional flatbed scanner to get scans of those films. i mentioned the cameras at the bottom, those are some of the most iconic photographs taken by those cameras. the photo on the left looks like

a scrubbing ball -- goal. -- scrubbing bowl. nice photographs of the fireball . next slide. this film, i have about 45 seconds of footage here from cameras at the trinity test. as you watch this film, i want you to put yourself in the position of the scientists at the site. one person didn't want to be there to witness this incredible event. the range of emotions they experienced at the trinity test.

and what was it like to be there, we can think about all this. if you are interested in the footage, it is available at the national security research center. we can go on to our next slide. there is smoke there. this is my favorite eyewitness descriptions. i believe we had 18 nobel laureates affiliated with the laboratory during world war ii. one of them was one of our consultants. emilio's a gray -- emilio segre is another nobel laureate. he said "we saw the whole sky flashed with unbelievable brightness in spite of the very dark glasses we wore."

philip morrison was 10 miles away from base camp, nearly twice as far from ground zero as oppenheimer was. he said "the thing that got me was not the flash but the blinding heat of a bright day on your face in the cold desert morning." from 10 miles away, he could feel the heat. ralph carlisle smith had a patent off this, yes, there were interesting patents office technology. he said, it turned yellow, then red, and i think they are incredible sites to behold. as carlisle describes. "the new york times" was on hand

[indiscernible] he was sworn to secrecy, brought into the project and was there. when the japanese are attacked with these weapons, the government felt it was necessary to let the public know what had happened as quickly as possible. [indiscernible] and the atomic strikes that would come about three weeks later. barry was another nobel laureate. what you see behind that photograph of barry, which is my favorite, it was taken by one of

barry's pupils at the university of chicago, behind the photograph you see barry's typed up observations of the trinity test. he described what was like to witness the test. he describes an experiment. heat -- he tore up a piece of paper and drop the pieces of paper at the blast strength pushed the paper and he measured the distance the paper had got -- had gone. it was not a huge displacement. he calculated the bomb yield was 2000 tons of tnt, based upon the improvised experiment that he did. the light sheet of paper on the fly. let's go to our next slide.

this is what it looked like. what about the emotional factor? these scientists had worked long come along days six days a week long into the night everyday. they had a lot invested in this test. now, the first i would like to share, first reaction, is the video. on the video, our first director j robert oppenheimer is talking about the test years after it was conducted. i want to preface this video with this. there has been stories written by a historian that you can buy online that talks about this very quote. oppenheimer says i remember the light from the bunker, the god

of war is trying to gear up the troops to do his duty and go to war. oppenheimer is the multi-armed god of war. . that is -- that is not how oppenheimer sees himself. he does not see himself as a destroyer of wars. oppenheimer sees himself as a prince who is reluctant to do his duty. as you watch this film clip, which takes about 45 seconds, bear that in mind. let's watch the film. >> the world would not be the same. some people left -- some people laugh, some people cry -- some people laughed, some people cried. [indiscernible]

i remember scripture. trying to persuade a prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on a many-armed form as a destroyer of worlds. i suppose i thought that. mr. carr: that is a pretty dramatic quota and one i imagine most of you have heard before. oppenheimer was not excited about putting nuclear weapons into combat. he is anyone else at that time to happen -- he more than anyone

else at that time knew what was going to happen. i don't think he changed that view throughout his life. and that the end of world war ii was an especially unpleasant set of circumstances. his record reflects what a lot of people felt at the time. bradberry says some people claim to have wondered at the time about the future of mankind. i didn't. we were at war and the damned thing work. after losing friends and family

in combat, you see bainbridge's quote. if you had to summarize the complete trinity emotional experience, you get one of our group leaders in the theoretical division. weiskopf says -- weisskopft says, our first feeling was one of elation, then we realized we were tired, and then we were worried. all the work they put into making this a success paid off. you would be elated too. and then they were tired. you have not had a good night's sleep in at least a week. finally, they were word. -- worried. we will talk more about that in a moment. before we do that though, marge

radford said, she knew something was going on and was not at the trinity site, she was far away and she said the spectacle was tremendous, beautiful, magnificent, terrifying, exciting, humbling, and scary. this person did not witness the trinity test. he chose to stay behind. it was apparently very quiet and very somber. going back to weisskopf's quote, why would you be worried, victor? because he recognizes america's

nuclear monopoly would not last long. he recognized other countries would eventually have nuclear weapons. and he imagined world war iii, another global war in which nations chose to use this invention from los alamos against each other in combat. they were worried. and after the long ride back to los alamos, they didn't stay too long. he said you could see it on the faces. i saw something very grave happen. to introduce levity, and other quote comes from george, who bet on this being a success against oppenheimer. he simply said [indiscernible]

and i believe he had oppenheimer signed that $10 bill. if somebody knows where that $10 is, you could probably get somebody to pay $10 for it. let's go to our next slide. we talked about the emotional argument, what about the physical aftermath? we talked about the blessed. it did come into contact with the ground. earth had been irradiated into the atmosphere, but a lot of it didn't reach the upper atmosphere. a lot of melted inside the fireball, and the rain spread

molten sand back to the surface over a 600-meter wide area. it was tens of millions of degrees hot for a measure of time. when it came down, it formed a greenish, glassy substance that has since been called trinity i -- trinitite. if you look at the trinititie -- if you take a look at the trinitite, take a moment to consider it was inside the fireball. the explosion produced a shadow crater around ground zero. you really can't tell where the crater is now.

it was large, but shallow. it didn't expose the concrete reinforced footings of the trinity tower. the picture second from left is oppenheimer, general groves, in the background kim nichols, he wrote a book about the nuclear test. there were looking at one of the footings of the tower. you can see the rebar or the concrete. at the point before the test, it had been underground. the test pushed the ground up, exposed to the concrete, pulled away the concrete, in the ground.

that is an aerial view of the trinity site. look at the bottom right, see that little dark spot with concentric rings? the dark spot is the 100 ton test, it was the largest measured blast in history up to that time. there had been larger explosions, but those explosions were the results of accidents or other things. one of the tests had a brief time as the largest scientific explosion and it made that dark dot. looking at the 600-meter wide area of the trinitite,

[indiscernible] let's go to another slide. i told you we would come back to fallout. you may have seen it in the news. trinity produced a significant amount of fallout. it scooped up a lot of desert sand. a lot of that stuff went way up into the atmosphere and came back down. as you can see from the map, remember this is not conjecture, there was a light of -- was a lot of data. monitors around the state recorded radiation levels. this is based on data which is

still preserved here at the national security research center. it reached a levels around ground zero. there were measurable readings in albuquerque and santa fe and los alamo's as well -- and los alamos as well. on july 14, stafford warren was the doctor of the entire project. 75 roentgens -- 75 roentgens is very high by today's standards. some say they knew it was dangerous and just didn't share.

they did know some, they knew this was going to be hazardous and that it was going to produce fallout. they cared. remember, they had learned an awful lot about these new materials and the dangers of them. but what was known during those years is not nearly as much as what we know now, especially in long-term. what do low doses people do -- what do low doses due to people and animals over a long time? there was nothing we had to go on. in the late teens and early 20's, many used radiant paint.

there really was no good data on the long-term expiration available at that time. but people knowing this would be dangerous, they best guessed based on what they knew at the time. that was quite an event over a two-week period. today, you are allowed to be exposed to approximately 75 r over the course of your lifetime. so the standard has changed. one family received as much as 47r over a two-week period.

the trinity effort made a significant effort to find out about every person. generally, people bear did pretty well. that is something that is still contested today. covid-19 is coming and going. but the cattle in the area fared worse. most people at 5:30 in the morning work still inside, many still asleep, some people were out. capital were outside drinking their coffee at 5:30 in the morning, they are outside all the time. so irradiated sand to state in

their hair -- irradiated sand that fell back down to earth stayed in their hair. 75 animals were brought back here to los alamos. it is not really a cattle ranching area here and we didn't know what to do with them. there were eventually sent to tennessee. you are going to see a picture of a trinity heard generations later -- trinity herd generations later. they were able to successfully reproduce healthy offspring. let's leave that topic for now as we start to bring this long lecture to a close.

my gratitude to my colleagues doing the recording. we will fast-forward to the end and see what happens. especially during these hazardous times. this talk is about trinity, so i am not going to talk about the end of world war ii, i may not touch on subjects that you are interested in. send me your questions, don't afraid to ask tough questions. this was certainly a momentous decision, an unprecedented one so far on august sit -- unprecedented one so far. august 6, 1945, hiroshima was attacked. after the pots dam conference,

president truman warned generals, surrender peacefully or face utter destruction. the japanese chose to respond to the president's threat by ignoring it. it did not bring generals to the surrender table. people ask if it was necessary? necessary to do what? was it necessary to win? no, because the japanese were going to be defeated one way or another. most of our resources were going to winning the war in europe. the allies had beaten up on the japanese for years, with a fraction of the resources available.

now that the germans had been knocked out of world war ii, we are going to take all the these resources from here and put them over here with what we have already got. as japan has a -- does japan have a path to victory? no. but they refused to surrender. i think the atomic bombs were a very important ingredient in bringing world war ii to a halt. world war ii didn't end in victory for the allies because of one or two or four things. a lot of things came together to bring world war ii to a successful end, and abrupt conclusion. years of conventional defeats inflicted on the japanese. there are strategic bombing --

the strategic bombing of japan. the blockade of japan which brought japan to the brink of starvation. if we hadn't used atomic bombs, world war ii would have continued on. i don't know how long, but it would have continued. what was important? one was the use of atomic bombs as an important ingredient in bringing an end to the war. as history would show, japanese soldiers had no problem dying for their country. but what if you didn't get a chance to fight for your country? this was a weapon that did not give you the opportunity. the soviet union entered the war against japan.

the soviet union had a nonaggression pact, but the soviet union recognized imperial japan was about to become complete history. this was not some cheap, late-war landgrab in asia by the soviet union. we wanted soviet -- we wanted the soviet union involved in the war and we asked them to joining the war against the japanese so the war would end more quickly and precisely. three months after the collapse of germany, remember which day fighting stopped in germany. may 8. august 8, three months later, the soviet union declares war on japan as we asked them to. and on august 9, hundreds of

thousands of soviet soldiers invaded manchuria. the red army killed about 84,000 japanese soldiers. august 9 did not get better for the japanese. around lunchtime, 11:11 that morning, a second atomic bomb was dropped, on nagasaki, japan. this was a significant step in bringing the war to a successful conclusion. [indiscernible] moody rotated her to one of his japanese counterpart -- moody wrote a letter to one of his

japanese counterparts. we had dropped atomic on hiroshima, we dropped another one this morning, and this rate of bombs will continue if you don't surrender now -- this rain of bombs will continue if you don't surrender now. it was a shock at hiroshima with a new era of weapons and it was a shock at nagasaki. not only did we have this weapon, but we could rapidly reproduce these weapons. the japanese had a nuclear weapons program, but the assumption may have been it might have taken years to produce enough material for a bomb. so they had a month to keep

insisting for better terms. they did not want to be tried for war crimes. they did not want their home islands to be occupied. they wanted to make sure they retained this position, so they would surrender, but on those terms. how do with -- how do we get them to surrender unconditionally? that is why the atomic bombs were such an important ingredient to bring world war ii to an end, because we are not going to need hundreds of thousands of american soldiers and soviet soldiers attacking japan. we can just control your country -- destroy your country, your cities, your people, your history, your culture, and you won't even get a chance to fight back. surrender and we will treat you

mercifully after you surrender unconditionally, which the allies did. a few days after nagasaki, a little more than a week after the bombing of hiroshima, that an armistice went into effect. the japanese did surrender unconditionally, with no guarantee. the fighting stopped august 14. world war ii officially came to an end a week after that. and floss alamosa receive the army-navy e award for excellence. you can see general groves giving an award to j robert oppenheimer. the pendant flying in the wind is on display on the second floor of the building at the conference center as a reminder of the awesome responsibility

the united states has for bringing these weapons to existence in the first place and using them first. it is a reminder of our heritage starting at trinity 75 years ago. let's look at a few more slides. the legacy of trinity, is that they bomb test, a science experiment, the answer is yes. the legacy of trinity is multifaceted. it is because so many things came together at trinity. let's look at a few. symbolically, trinity marked the beginning of the final chapter of the existence of imperial japan. the allies knew that the war,

with nuclear weapons, they knew it was going to be a lot less bloody for the allies. nothing japanese. it was clear that the end was near. it was crystal clear with the trinity test. and that is important because of the scale of world war ii. millions of people died in world war ii as a result of military action. that is going to come to an abrupt end very quickly. trinity opened a new era in human history. at one point, the u.s. had 10,000 nuclear weapons. they were scared of a nuclear war, may be a nuclear war brought on by human or technological error. humanity had more firepower to

destroy itself, just about, maybe 10 times over. that is something we could not have done earlier. i think it a lot of nuclear technology has not been fully exploded or even close to it. i think nuclear technology will help ensure a sustainable and more secure future for the people of this world. another thing that is clear is that nuclear weapons have played an important part in rendering global wars among the great powers obsolete. and i am not saying nuclear weapons are the only ingredient in that, but they are obviously significant. so a mixed legacy.

have you been thinking about it during the talk this morning? do you think trinity is the greatest scientific experiment ever conducted? there is a strong case for. other scientific experiments have strong cases as well, but when you consider trinity and think about all the sides that went into making trinity possible, chemistry, metallurgy, nuclear science, etc., these were not new fields of science. but at trinity, so many scientific fields were pushed to new limits all at the same time. and as a result, trinity resulting in a new era of humankind. so trinity really was a

significant, significant scientific experiment, arguably the most important. what about cp one, university of chicago, world's first controlled nuclear chain reaction? this was the world's first uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction. talk about it among yourselves and spark some good conversation and inspiration for the next experiment. trinity helped usher in the age of super science. we had never heard use of that phrase before. i have rarely heard of a term to define it.

there have always been scientific experiments, there were always teams working together on experiments, maybe large teams, there were experiments with large teams that were sponsored by the government, that is all true. but there was nothing in history like the manhattan project, not in terms of scale and i would say not in terms of accomplishment. you had a massive team, not just 1700 staff members. you had one million people contributing -- you had half a million people contributing, just to one scientific project. you had academia playing a major role, academia at universities, academic institutions. the government invested $2 billion in this. by today's standards, they might

-- that may not seem like much and even adjusted for inflation, it is a relatively no number -- relatively low number. but given the depression, that was a massive, massive expenditure in a time of war by the united states. people were coming together and do something that would not have been possible. to me, that is what super science really is. you had an entire nation coordinated, coming together, investing a tremendous amount of time, money, other resources, people working together to change the world. that is super science. and there are a few examples of it in history. i think the trinity did very much represent the beginning of this new era, and we have seen it in other projects that would

happen in the future such as the human genome project. so that is much of trinity's legacy as well. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2021] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] i had the opportunity to visit the trinity site. my traveling companion was charlie mcmillan, one of the directors here -- someone the directors here still remember well. charlie had never visited. he recognized the magnitude of the university and wanted to make sure he was at trinity first before the spoke about trinity and the celebration and rings of that nature. so we drove down there together,

and that was a lot of fun. i heard his thoughts on a variety of different topics. you remember the famous photo of oppenheimer and groves. the photograph that you see here is a photograph that i took of charles. as you see, things have changed. if you look carefully, you can see the rebar sticking up from the ground. they cut back the rebar there and put other rebar there. some of the vegetation has come back as well. the crater as i mentioned, is very shallow. there is just a shallow depression. there is noble, there is no

blast, all those things are gone. it was a site where everything was just about destroyed.

-- i want to thank all these folks for having put this talk together. i hope it has been informative. i'm not trying to sound like a commercial, but this is really a place where people changed the world.

we all bay area responsibility for this type of technology, and may we continue to recognize at told sacred that responsibility. it is a responsibility that is going to be around for a long time. we have incredible people such as yourselves, so thank you very much for tuning in and making it to the -- send me an email if you have any questions. >> next on history bookshelf, peggy, who worked for ronald reagan, talks about her book,

"the president will see you now." the ronald reagan presidential library hosted the event in 2017. in about 90 minutes, the impact of world war ii when japanese-americans from the lens of her family experience. and in two hours on the civil war, ted witmer, author of lincoln on the verge, 13 days to washington, talks about it to mulch a list time during american history. -- talks about a tumultuous time during american